Monday, December 29. 2008
 I looked through our ABC Carpet link and found the rug in the photo. A Caucasian Kazak, my favorite "brand." Readers, buy it for me! It would add beauty to my life.
Malthus, Scrooge, and others. Lionel Tiger on bonobos and utopia What the heck is this "ranked choice voting" all about? Most embarassing global warming claims of 2008 Cigarettes are sublime. Too true. Harold Pinter hated us. Quoted at Big Lizards: The U.N. General Assembly split over the issue of gay rights on Thursday after a European-drafted statement calling for decriminalization of homosexuality prompted an Arab-backed one opposing it. Diplomats said a joint statement initiated by France and the Netherlands gathered 66 signatures in the 192-nation assembly after it was read out by Argentina at a plenary session. A rival statement, read out by Syria, gathered some 60.
The State is our shepherd Jeb Bush? Why not? Why we need newspapers. Surber. I agree. Just the facts, please. A final look at Barack, The Magic Negro From New England Repub: Obama isn’t going to put gas in your car nor pay your rent. As for Gov Patrick, he thinks you’re good for one thing, more taxes, and Barney Frank doesn’t like you. Now compete with Jose for the lawn mowing job.
From Andy McCarthy: The question is whether the Palestinian people are educable. Which brings me back to the first point: the Palestinians voted to put in power — i.e., vest with the power of a quasi-sovereign government — a terrorist organization which thinks legitimate governing consists of bringing about the annihilation of its sovereign neighbor and, meantime, targeting the said neighbor's civilian population with bombing attacks. When you do that, you make yourself a target. There are worse things than war — like Hamas. They have to be defeated, just like al Qaeda had to be defeated in Iraq.
Sowell, via Betsy: Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal policies of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along.
Toyota, Honda and other foreign automakers are not heading for Detroit, even though there are lots of experienced automobile workers there. They are avoiding the rust belts and the policies that have made those places rust belts.
A bailout of Detroit's Big Three would be only the latest in the postponements of reality.
George Bush, The Great Liberator. I'm down with that. Good man, lousy pol. Quoted at American Digest: President-Elect Man-Child: The man-child projects a simultaneous sense of not being comfortable in his own skin and perpetually on display to others. He's twitchy, approval-seeking, and doesn't know when to shut up. He's never been tested to anywhere near the limits of his physical or moral courage, and deep within himself he knows that because of this he is weak. Unproven. Not really a man. And it shows in a lot of little ways - posture, gaze patterns, that sort of thing. He'll overreact to small challenges and freeze or crumble under big ones. - Armed and Dangerous ? Blog Archive ? Where the men are
Reality will grow him up, as it does with all of us. He has had a charmed life thus far, in many ways.
Sunday, December 28. 2008
ABC Carpet in NYC has a major antique rug sale going on. It's fun to flip through the examples they put on their site. Real antique oriental rugs are made with vegetable dyes and not modern dyes which weaken the wool fibers. Few man-made things are more lovely, and you hate to put them in places where people will step on them with shoes because they can easily last a few more hundred years if treated properly. (Thanks for corrections of my errors of fact, Commenters. I should never say anything about something I only know a little bit about...but if I stuck with that rule, I would never say a thing. The word "dilettante" has two connotations.) On the left is an antique Turkish Konye; on the right is an antique Iranian Bakhtiari.  
 Resist the urge to trash your husbands.
Global warming is caused by computers. Amazon's best year ever Computer ownership, by country. I don't see China on the list. Africa needs God "On the sick" in Britain. It pays to be fat or an addict in the UK. Cool, dude. How would this story be reported if it had been the other way around? Now they can say it: Bush has advanced health care Fashionable scientific illiteracy Hooking up update If not appointed, I won't run Can you give Wikipedia a hand? A wonderful site, but it doesn't make $. Like Maggie's. Teddy Roosevelt, Socialist? The top political scandals of 2008. AVI A Pomo Christmas Story: S,C&A Taliban fighting for freedom Sarah was a member of the wrong party: Palin vs. Caroline. Also, More on Palin Bad, kennedy Good. Also, she doesn't sound too bright or aware. I know plenty of heavyweight folks who need an easy job more than she does. Indeed, all reporting these days is partisan-motivated. See Barak's fancy vacation in Hawaii.  Michelle:
Fit Republican president = Selfish, indulgent, creepy fascist. Fit Democratic president = Disciplined, health-conscious Adonis role model.
J Post: Since the cease-fire went into effect in Gaza in June, Hamas used the lull in action to fortify its military posts in the Gaza Strip and to dig tunnel systems as well as underground bunkers for its forces. IDF estimates put the length of the tunnels at over 50 kilometers.
Related, from VDH: Certain deranged reactions are now anticlimactic—a local water main bursts and so we blame Bush for diverting resources away from infrastructure; an arctic freeze or a summer tornado alike evokes Bush and his wayward attitude toward global warming. In the same vein, Hamas blankets Israel for days with rockets and the Europeans are silent until Israel responds with force—only to be blamed for inordinate aggression—the subtext being both that the militarily capable party is to be condemned for being,well, too militarily capable, and that those who can field and deploy terrorists, or aid those who will, against Western targets are deserving of some sort of exemption.
Related: Hamas got what it wanted. No doubt. Does public spending stimulate? Why banks are a special case. Megan. I agree with that. Samuel Huntington, RIP: Huntington, who graduated from Yale College at age 18 and who was teaching at Harvard by age 23, was best known for his views on the clash of civilizations. He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nation states, but from cultural and religious differences among the world's major civilizations. Huntington, who was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, identified these major civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, and "Sinic" (including China, Korea, and Vietnam). "My argument remains," he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica Magazine, "that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states."
Saturday, December 27. 2008
Our thanks to Gene Expressions for finding the way cool Strange Maps. Two samples: Jeopardy watchers: 
The 2008 Pres election, by county: 
Quoted from Steyn: “Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”
Hey, that’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”
And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these last few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.
And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.
Some people are impossible to please.
From Bruce Kesler: In light of the self-righteous pomposity with which some make a bad joke of their religiosity, here’s a clip of a popular Chanukah song that shares the fun of religion:
Sling shot shooter. Like any great shooter, he doesn't know how he does it. Rufus Hussey (h/t, Theo)
Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer this week. We posted on her performance on April 13 of this year, when she was in fine fettle. Here is our post: I had the remarkable pleasure and privilege of being invited to a small fund-raiser gathering last night at which Eartha Kitt performed a dynamite set. At 81, she is in great shape, a wonderful and sexy performer, and she still can sing ferociously - and in Japanese or Turkish when she wants to. She has a gift for languages. She surely gives the impression of enjoying the whole thing. Got my photo taken with her. She lives in Westport, CT and will be doing her usual gig at the Cafe Carlisle again this year, after a two-week stint in Paris - God bless her. This is C'est si bon from 1961:
 2008 Media Research Center Awards for moonbat media
Kwanzaa is really over. I heard jokes about it at the beginning, but not even a joke for years now, which is proof that it is irrelevent. An Iditerod without dogs. Good grief. Anything without dogs is a drag. The final proof of climate change: Q&O Brit Hume: retiring, but not gone What happened to muni swaps. Caveat emptor. I am not guilty. So why should I pay for these messes? Obama's "job fetish." Reason Via Gene Expressions: We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour.
Liberal Joel Stein admits he doesn't love America. That explains a lot. He seems to like Sweden, partly for their sexual "freedom." So leave, Joel, and get your recreational sex! Sweden happily accepts immigrants, but they seem to prefer Moslems. Sweden and Moslems: Perfect Together. Not meant as a joke: Indulgences in San Francisco. Who expects to make $ from this scam? Jimmy Carter did the hope and change schtick too. Am Thinker Corporate welfare, institutionalized. At Marg Rev: I believe that moving more assets under government guarantees is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.
The Bernie Madoff I knew. Detroit Update. Where the sirens never sleep. Yet another corrupt Dem to add to the list? Gov. Richardson
 Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.
This song is from As You Like It
A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries. This one is the Biblioteca Geral University of Coimbra, Portugal (h/t, Samiz): 
Friday, December 26. 2008
 Matthew 5:13
Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. This scripture is put into context by Sipp, (with Ginger Ale which, in my opinion, is almost as good as Ginger Beer. And the mere mention of Ginger Beer puts me in the mood for a Dark 'n Stormy.)
From Bruce Kesler: In light of how the language of Jews has entered common usage in America: During the first day of Hanukkah, two elderly Jewish men were sitting in a wonderful deli frequented almost exclusively by Jews in New York City. They were talking amongst themselves in Yiddish - the colorful language of Jews who came over from Eastern Europe
A Chinese waiter, only one year in New York, came up and in fluent impeccable Yiddish asked them if everything was okay and if they were enjoying the holiday.
The Jewish men were dumbfounded. “Where did he ever learn such perfect Yiddish?” they both thought. After they paid the bill they asked the restaurant manager, an old friend of theirs, “Where did our waiter learn such fabulous Yiddish?”
The manager looked around and leaned in so no one else will hear and said... “Shhhh. He thinks we're teaching him English.”  When in Israel, I told a variation of this joke to my host. He, then, invited me to meet him for lunch the next day at the members’ club of the Tel Aviv diamond exchange. The maitre d’ was a 6-foot tall Chinese man, who spoke in Hebrew, he being the husband of a Jewish woman diamond merchant who’d met him at the Hong Kong diamond exchange. Israel, like the US, is a population drawn from around the world, initially speaking a polyglot of languages, but adopting a common language and culture.
My hardworking Yiddish speaking immigrant grandparents owned a tailor store in downtown Brooklyn. Their presser for several decades was a Black man who spoke Yiddish to the customers. When I was a small child, he always had time for me. I learned as much Yiddish from him as from my grandparents. Famous books by Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish and The Joys of Yinglish, are hundreds of pages of words that many non-Jewish Americans use or hear frequently and are chock full of definitions and jokes. A measure of the contribution to America by various ethnic groups is the degree to which its language and culture enters common usage. There are about as many Moslems in the US as Jews, yet sadly the only Islamic word most in the US have come to know is “jihad.”
"I've been known to be calm." Please Mrs. Henry with The Band, from the mostly-playful and never released and never intended for release practice Basement Tapes from the garage at Big Pink outside Woodstock (good photos):
An important essay: Obama’s Job-Creation Program Flunks Basic Math by Caroline Baum at Bloomberg. One quote: There’s nothing like a crisis to play on the public’s insecurity and expand the reach of government. There’s nothing like a serious financial crisis to get economists of all persuasions on board. Opportunity in Crisis “In this crisis lies an opportunity to create the jobs that America needs, doing the work that America needs,” said Larry Summers, Obama’s top economic adviser, at a press conference yesterday. The best intentions face a stark reality: There may be more money than opportunities. It’s one thing to spend money to improve and update crumbling infrastructure. It’s quite another to find projects on short notice. There’s a limit to how fast even our profligate politicians can get money out the door.
What is defined as a "crisis" is quite subjective, if not entirely trumped up and manipulated for political purposes. The "opportunity in crisis" is, indeed, to expand the reach and control of government, whether it's war, recession - or manufactured crises like "health care." That's been the Statist tactic since FDR, and I resent it.
In my view, it is best to consider all knowledge as tentative. The best scholars maintain an open-mindedness and humility about even their own core beliefs. Greg Mankiw
At Englishman. You can read the wiki on the Golden Angle here.
 The Boxing Day meets are a fine old English tradition. Has the hunt outfoxed the law? (h/t, Theo)
I hope you had a merry holiday. I finally saw Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Hilariously un-PC and insensitive, and therefore highly recommended. Now, back to work.  Christmas in Baghdad. Photo from the piece at Gateway
Harvard's endowment likely lost much more than they are saying. University greed is the problem. What's with the double-counting? I don't get it. Handel's Messiah: I thought I saw the face of God. The alarmists are becoming increasingly shrill. Maybe they are worried that we quit listening, and have begun to mock and satirize them. Dang it, we want warmening - for the children. Coyote on the wind power scam and the green jobs myth. A year of scary, trumped-up myths about smoking and obesity. Spiked. Sounds like people don't like to feel pushed around by the government they pay for. AVI on Special Education. From everything I've read about education, "special" or otherwise, neither $, nor computers, nor fancy buildings make any difference at all. "More Science in journalism school, please." Surber. My impression is that journalists understand science about as well as they understand economics. Speaking of science, Politicizing Science at Powerline. Steyn on Subprime Education, ... in America, so-called "expanding opportunities for college" is an obvious crock to absolve high schools of their failure to educate.
with a h/t to Viking who also quoted Professor X thus: There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces-social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students-that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment. Rape or love? Sounds like love to me. What's the latest on Sen. Dodd? And why do Libs always get a free pass on their sleaziness? Jonah critiques the New Republic's critique of Liberal Fascism Well put, by Rick Moran: Our economic situation is dire – and being made more so by mortgaging our future so that politicians can be seen to be “doing something about the problem.”
Thursday, December 25. 2008
Thanks for all the kind words from our visitors over the past week or so. Your appreciation is our reward - along with our own pleasure and education. 
 From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:
In light of the contributions of Jews to Christian celebrations of Christmas, two songs that never caught on:
- Deck the Halls with Balls of Matzos - Jumpin’ around the Chanukah Bush Some famous Christmas songs written by Jews: White Christmas Christmas Song We Need A Little Christmas Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree A Holly Jolly Christmas The Christmas Waltz Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow Silver Bells I’m Getting Nuttin’ For Christmas Santa Baby Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Sleigh Ride I’ll Be Home For Christmas It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year There’s No Place Like Home For The Holidays Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed The World) The United States is the shining light on the hill to all who care for freedom and the land that has given generations of Jewish and other immigrants and refugees the sanctuary and liberties from which they’ve been allowed to heavily contribute back for the benefit of all. Photo: Ellis Island Menorah from Levine
This one from our virtual friend Sissy grabbed me:
From The Truth about Christmas in American Thinker: Jesus Christ staked his whole reputation, without reservation, on the claim that his equality with God was firmly anchored on nothing but the truth. And the truth is not subject to one's preference; it is true, whether one believes it or not. It is not contingent upon belief, but rather belief is only justified when that upon which it is grounded is the truth. This is the context within which Jesus Christ made his rather astonishing claim, the truthfulness of which endows the story of Christmas with its enduring significance. And though he made it in a least intrusive and most gentle fashion, he did not seek - then or today - to indulge the neutrality or merely passive assent from his hearers, because like no one else, he fully understood the full force of its implications.
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